Recent disagreements over Beijing’s claim to the South China Seas (in which a tribunal constituted under the UN Convention on the…
Finale of the Persian Monarchy and Prelude to the Iranian Revolution
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, departed Tehran on January 16, 1979 to seek medical treatment and to escape…
Persistence, Vision and Luck: Creating a Center for Diplomatic Training
Can you imagine the bureaucratic struggles involved in persuading the Department of Defense to hand over acres of prime real…
Bad Blood: The Sino-Soviet Split and the U.S. Normalization with China
In the 1960s, in the depths of the Cold War, the world was viewed in terms of a zero-sum game:…
When Friends Spy on Friends: The Case of Jonathan Pollard
Former Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard delivered over 800 highly classified documents to the Israeli government over a 17-month…
East Germany Builds the Berlin Wall
The summer of 1961 was fraught with tensions between Moscow and Washington. Berlin, which had been a Cold War flash…
Jesse Helms: The Senator Who Just Said No
Jesse Alexander Helms, a five-term Republican Senator (1973- 2003) from North Carolina, was known not only for his conservative beliefs…
The Extra Special Relationship: Thatcher, Reagan, and the 1980s
The “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom has served to unite the two nations over the…
The Neutron Bomb — A Negotiating Dud
The neutron bomb, a low-yield thermonuclear weapon which would be especially lethal to enemy ground troops but would not seriously…
Modern Turkey’s History of Military Coups
The July 2016 attempted coup d’état in Turkey was the latest in a series of military interventions in the nation’s…